Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone. —Tomas Tranströmer

My friends say Tolstoy really got into the heads of his female characters.They give him credit. They talk dreamily of the books they love,books so long only two will make a whole course. This seems to melike making twelve gallons of chili and eating nothing else till it’s gone,but I smile and listen. My friends are smarter than me and more patient,surely. I’m the only guy in the house tonight so I get my own roomwith a good foam mattress, a bad desk, windows that open on other rooms.I make up the bed and lie down with Tranströmer’s poems, ten or twentylines on a page, fewer words in fifty years than Tolstoy or George Eliotput down in a decent work week. Every man is a half-open door.

The door to my room is cracked open, lights blaze outside. My friendsare all upstairs. If I don’t shut the light off, no one will. The windwill settle toward morning, the waves begin again to spell their singlecomplicated word. Waiting for the ferry we watched a hawktry to lift a four-foot snake from the shallows, drop it, circle, swoopand grab again and lose its grip and veer away. Oh, how sweet wouldthat meat have been, how grand a feast, how we would have crackedand sucked the bones, how long we could have made that story last.